About our Science
The Queensland Future Climate Science Program
The Queensland Future Climate Science Program is delivered through a partnership between the Queensland Government and the University of Queensland. The Program involves downscaling global climate models to provide high-resolution climate projections for Queensland, analysis of climate extremes, and the translation of knowledge into climate services.
The information and resources provided by the Program supports the Queensland Climate Adaptation Strategy (Q-CAS) by enabling assessments of future climate risk, supporting adaptation planning across multiple sectors, informing the design of climate policies and programs, and ensuring a more sustainable future for Queenslanders.
Access to the projections data and summary information is provided through online tools including the Queensland Future Climate Dashboard, Regional Explorer and the Tropical Cyclone Dashboard. These tools enable users to explore, customise, visualise and download summarised future climate information according to their interests.
The climate models and data
The high-resolution climate change projections available on Queensland Future Climate were produced using a dynamical downscaling approach to provide a spatial resolution of about 10 km over the Queensland region.
Dynamical downscaling approaches use output from the Global Climate Model as well as refined elevation, land cover and coastline data to build a Regional Climate Model and significantly improve the spatial resolution of climate change projections. We use a regional climate model developed by CSIRO named the Conformal Cubic Atmospheric Model (CCAM).
The most recent projections for Queensland are based on the modelling completed by the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) that supported the development of the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). However, projections for Queensland based on the previous 5th phase (CMIP5) models are also available.
Factsheets on the Queensland Future Climate site explain the differences between CMIP5 and CMIP6, and also provide more details on the climate models used.
The Program's climate projections are recognised as best practice data for impact assessments across Queensland. The projections have featured in several peer-reviewed scientific publications (refer to Additional Resources), providing end-users with a trustworthy data resource for state-wide climate change risk assessments.
The CMIP6 high-resolution climate projections produced by the program are the largest ensemble of projections available for Australia, totalling 60 model runs spanning historical and future simulations. The Program is a member of the National Partnership for Climate Projections, a national collaboration aiming to deliver consistent, high-quality climate projections data and information for Australia. This work includes the delivery of an hourly 20km resolution dataset for all of Australasia that is compliant with the requirements of the COordinated Regional climate Downscaling EXperiment (CORDEX). The partnership includes other climate modelling teams in Australia. The contributions of these teams to the national climate science program are described in the Climate Projections Roadmap for Australia.
The team
The science program is delivered by the Climate Projections and Services team in the Department of Energy and Climate along with its members and collaborators from The University of Queensland. The team includes well-regarded research scientists with expertise ranging across climate modelling, climate extremes, hydroclimate, data analytics, web development and knowledge brokering.
